The journalist Yoani Sánchez, director of the independent newspaper 14ymedio, reported on Friday that agents of the political police are conducting an operation outside her apartment building in Havana to prevent her from leaving home, one day after being released after nearly nine hours of detention in a holding cell of the Fourth Police Station in the Cerro municipality.
"In the basement of my building, there is an operation by the political police to prevent me from leaving home this Friday," Sánchez wrote on his X account, where the post garnered thousands of interactions within a few hours.
On Thursday, three state security agents in plain clothes forcibly confronted her as she was leaving her home in Nuevo Vedado without identifying themselves at any point. They placed her in a police vehicle and took her to the station on Infanta Street. The authorities charged her with an alleged crime of propaganda against the constitutional order, linked to her journalistic work: the podcast Cafecito Informativo, 14ymedio itself, and her street segments under the pseudonym "Andarina Sánchez."
"They want me to be quiet, they want me to leave, they want me to silence myself, they want me to turn off the microphones. But I am not going to turn them off," he stated in a video posted on Facebook in which he expressed gratitude for the international solidarity that contributed to his release.
But Sánchez didn't use that space just to talk about her case. What she witnessed in the holding cells led her to make a statement that, in her own words, she cannot silence.
"I have watched in horror as most of the detainees at that police station were there for being illegal in Havana. People whom the police stop in the street, check their identification cards, and, lacking a local address here in Havana, are not only arrested but forcibly deported back to their provinces," he recounted.
"The two words I heard the most while in that cell were 'illegal' and 'deportation,'" he added, describing cases of people who had left their children in the care of others before being forcibly moved back to their provinces of origin.
This practice is legally backed by the Decree-Law 217, approved in 1997, which requires prior administrative authorization for any Cuban from another province to establish residency in the capital. Those who do not obtain it may be fined and deported. Human Rights Watch documented around 20,000 forced expulsions under this regulation. On November 2nd, a MININT operation in San Miguel del Padrón resulted in 71 arrests, including individuals classified by the authorities themselves as "undocumented and illegal" in the capital.
Sánchez also denounced the complete subordination of the Revolutionary National Police to State Security. "I denounce the bending, the total docility, the absolute compliance of the Revolutionary National Police to State Security. It is the true power in this country," he noted, describing how uniformed officers would freeze whenever a civilian showed credentials from the G2.
Sánchez's arrest is part of a week of intense repression: historian Alina Bárbara López was beaten and handcuffed on November 1 in Matanzas; journalist Camila Acosta was detained two days later; and CubaNet contributor Adelth Bonne Gamboa was arrested on November 2 along with the confiscation of equipment. The Committee to Protect Journalists condemned Sánchez's arrest and placed it within a broader context of repression against independent press in Cuba.
"This highlights the terror, the control, the dictatorship under which we are living, that we cannot even move freely between the municipalities of our city," concluded Sánchez.
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